Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

We live in an age of skepticism, a time where the very idea of God is humorous to some of the so-called new atheists. For them, God is just funny idea made up by people. My students are also skeptical and often tell me that God appears to have done all sorts of miracles back then, but it's different now. God isn't really at work in today's world, they say. If God were acting, we'd see something different than we do. Today's passages speak to these attitudes a bit, for the first is about a man who is himself skeptical - yes, even "back then." Abraham is skeptical and seems even a bit disrespectful in today's passage (Genesis 17:1, 9-10, 15-22). Consider the background: Abraham is ninety-nine years old. Years before, God made him move about five hundred miles from his homeland and his family and he's been wandering about in the land of Canaan for decades. Back then, God said he would make Abraham the father of many, but here it is years later, and nothing promising has happened. He and Sarah have been unable to have children.

So now, at a time when Sarah most definitely is past child-bearing age, God comes to Abraham and proclaims that she will have a son. Now, sometimes I think the impact of a story escapes us because we think, "Oh, of course God made Sarah pregnant. God is God and can do that kind of thing. And he DID, back in those days, but now he doesn't." Sometimes I think we think that Bible characters just kind of expected God to do these magic-like things and so we see it as more myth than anything.

But in this story, Abraham is clearly more like us - he is skeptical and he thinks the whole prospect is rather funny. Abraham is trying desperately to be respectful (he prostrates himself) and yet at the same time, he is laughing at the idea. From my own perspective today, I have a grandmother who is ninety-eight. I can't imagine her announcing, "God says I will have a son." I'd be laughing too.

But this is GOD - the one who created the world, the one who does all these miracles, the one who sent his Son to die for us. Surely it is disrespectful to doubt and laugh skeptically. Abraham thinks this through and gets very skeptical - so skeptical, in fact, that he doesn't think Sarah's pregnancy will happen. So he tells God to let Ishmael (his son by another woman) live, as a safeguard. But God tells him, "No,that's not the way it works. I'm doing something unique and strange."

The whole situation is an indication that maybe miracles and God's actions were just as rare and strange then as they are now. The Bible tells only particular stories, not the stories of every single person that God has a relationship with. The Gospel passage (Matthew 8:1-4) reinforces this idea: Jesus heals a leper, but he realizes that some will be skeptical that the miracle had really occured. Leprosy at that time was a particular problem beccause people didn't want to touch lepers, but then how would you know they'd been cured? So Jesus tells the leper how to give signs of proof.

What can these stories offer in our own age of skepticism? I think it is to be prepared for God to surprise us in today's era. We will not see miracles around every bend, nor definite proof that God exists and loves us. That is not the way God works. But we can be open to the uniqueness and strangeness of God, nonetheless.

- Jana M. Bennett